Sajjad Lone, moderate Kashmiri politician singed for his ties with BJP

Recently, People's Conference Chairman Sajjad Lone staked claim to form government in J&K despite having only two MLAs. But the Governor dissolved the Assembly

With only two MLAs in the 87-member Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, Sajjad Lone wanted to become chief minister.

But, before he could execute his plan, Governor Satyapal Malik dissolved the House, claiming he was under pressure to install a man as chief minister who would have had little acceptability, and so he just ended the chances of a situation where the tail got to wag the dog. Why the governor did this is another story.

But who is Sajjad Lone?

It was May 2002. The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government was in power in Delhi when the then principal secretary, Brajesh Mishra, got a call. The worst had happened. People’s Conference leader Abdul Ghani Lone had been killed by militants at Eidgah Maidan, downtown Srinagar, while he was paying homage to Moulvi Mirwaiz Farooq, the father of the current Mirwaiz. 

For Lone’s two sons, Bilal and Sajjad, it was as if the world had come to an end. The senior Lone was considered a brave man. He had worked with Sheikh Abdullah but had joined the Hurriyat conference. Still, the government had thought it could talk to him. If the militants could do this to him, they would stop at nothing. Both brothers schooled in politics and militancy took different paths. Bilal continued to run the People’s Conference, flirting with extremism. Sajjad rejected that option and parted ways with his brother in February 2004 to float his own faction of the People’s Conference.

In 2004, the Congress came to power at the Centre. The 2008 Assembly elections saw a healthy turnout, suggesting the Valley was fed up with militancy — 60 people had been killed in the Amarnath land row and the Valley was rejecting the militant call for boycotting the election and people instead came out in large numbers to vote. Sajjad called on the separatists to review their strategy for being heard by Delhi. Simultaneously, he prepared a report on what he thought was the right way to address the Kashmir issue. The then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, met him and encouraged him to write a document outlining his ideas. He did, but later he could not meet Singh: This annoyed him and he began to believe the Congress was not interested in a solution.

He took the electoral plunge in April 2009 and contested as an Independent. He lost the election badly. Then came the 2014 Assembly elections. He thought he needed help. By then, Narendra Modi had become prime minister. He met Modi and was deeply impressed by him. Modi and the BJP, in turn, thought he could be a vehicle for expanding the party’s footprint in the Valley. He contested from Handwara and defeated then sitting minister Chaudhary Mohammad Ramzan of the National Conference and his one-time “proxy” Ghulam Mohiuddin Sofi, who contested on a PDP ticket. His party also managed to win the nearby Kupwara assembly segment.

Then came the bargaining. He was offered three different portfolios. He rejected all as not being “meaty” enough. Finally, he settled for social welfare. Then chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed did not want him in the Cabinet but had to concede when the BJP agreed to give him a position from its “quota”.

There’s no denying that Lone did many creative things in his ministry. District-level counselling centres were set up, which not only addressed drug addiction but also socio-political issues. These centres were limited to south Kashmir and when he wanted to expand them, the government found there were not enough trained people.

His friends say Lone is truly secular and no longer has any sympathy with militancy as an answer to the problems of the state. He is articulate and warm-hearted. But he is also ambitious. Somewhere lurking in his mind is the thought that if Omar Abdullah could become chief minister as a dynast, so could he.

Is it his ambition that did him in? Or did tried and trusted friends in the BJP let him down? Whatever be the reasons for the sudden and abrupt dissolution of the Assembly, but now he has been politically compromised and the outcome can only be bad: For him and other moderates like him.